Stay Up To Date

Get "First Thing Monday" for a quick summary each Monday about what’s new and noteworthy in SEO, PPC & Web Analytics. But only the stuff that matters from a New Zealand perspective. Less noise, more signal!

The irony – Google hiring an SEO expert to help it rank better!

A job opening advertised last week by Google has generated a great deal of amusement, and not just amongst professional SEOs.

Google is recruiting an SEO manager to boost its rankings in Google. Yes, really!

A job listing on the Google Careers Portal describes the main responsibility of the ‘Program Manager, Search Engine Optimisation’ role as helping “drive organic traffic and business growth”. You can check it out here.

Few will miss the irony that world’s most dominant search engine – which practically defines the rules of SEO – needs help with SEO itself.

Some are speculating this may be a response to the heat Google has been getting from European regulators for allegedly gaming its searches to artificially favour its own sites at the expense of its competitors. i.e. Google needs to be seen to be playing fairly.

However there’s strong evidence that Google really does need SEO help. There have been plenty of examples of where Google has been compelled to penalise itself for breaking the rules it expects others to follow. Furthermore, do a search in Google for “search engine” and you’ll see Google returns 361 million results and Google, the #1 search engine, is not in the first 10 results (but DuckDuckGo and Bing are). Currently Google appears in position 18 at the bottom of page two.

Why should you care?

Are you having problems convincing others in your organisation of the importance of SEO and that getting expert help is essential? If so, pointing out that even Google themselves are hiring SEO experts may well be the game changing argument you need.

Jeremy and Mark are two of the partners behind SureFire Search. Despite their deceptively youthful appearances, both have worked in search marketing for many years. To put that in context, Google didn't even exist when Jeremy started.